The installation of Matthew Day Jackson's 'Burghers of Calais' at Swiss Gallery Hauser & Wirth
- My favorite quote in The Wall Street Journal’s article on mega-sized galleries and mega-sized art projects is Hauser & Wirth’s Director Mark Payot on the gallery’s decision to give away free coffee on the weekends. “We don’t need to sell coffee.” The other bit of news: Matthew Day Jackson is gonna open a new nonprofit gallery called Bunker 259. Can. Not. Wait. [Hauser & Wirth]
- Certified copy or authenticated original? A Caravaggio painting of two boys playing cards was sold by Sotheby’s in 2006 for 42,000. The auction house is now being sued by a collector who claims it’s a Caravaggio–and worth 10 million. [Insurance Journal]
- Director Marc Glimcher says Pace is just as friendly and approachable as when it began. “It’s really the same family it always was—just a bit bigger.” [ArtInfo]
- Detroit has been delivered its new hero. A Robocop statue whose birth can be traced to a suggestion tweeted to Mayor Bing in 2011 has finally arrived to its hometown and is projected to be unveiled by August of next year. “Yeah, it’s silly,” Walley admits. “But is there no place for 10 feet of silliness within 139 square miles of our expansive city?” [Mother Jones]
- Alexander Augustus’ installation “A Dangerous Fire” at London’s Sommerset House used crowdsourced selfies to create a digitized portrait of the UK’s young unemployed. [Frieze]
- David Hockney’s assistant went on drink and drugs binge then jumped off balcony before killing himself by drinking concentrated sulphuric acid at artist’s home. That’s just the headline. [Daily Mail]
- American income equality is less now in absolute terms now than it was in 1774. Lindert and Williamson write, “Among all American households, slaves included, the richest 1 percent had only 7.1 percent of total income . . . . [In] the United States today . . . almost 20 percent of total income accrues to the top 1 percent.” [The Berkley Blog via: Shane Ferro]
- New Zealand sort of bans software patents. [Techdirt, Techdirt]
